Revisiting Olis' injustices: Will anyone listen yet?

By Loren Steffy |
October 10, 2007

So uber-lawyer John O'Quinn decided Tuesday morning to say it again, and this time say it with enough fanfare to remind us that we should all be outraged by Olis' fate.

O'Quinn, with TV cameras in place, stood with Olis' wife, Monica, and recounted pitfalls of the case against the former Dynegy tax manager.

He spoke of the "mass prosecutorial misconduct," he complained of government witnesses who "did not tell the truth," and he groused about Dynegy's decision to cut off Olis' legal fees, thereby strangling his defense.

He called for Olis' 2003 fraud conviction to be vacated. He asked for a new trial. He requested Olis be released on bail.

Most of this has been tried and appealed and revisited, and Olis, 42, remains in federal prison serving a six-year sentence.

So it needs to be said again.

Transparent ploy

We can forgive O'Quinn his front-of-the-courthouse theater. It was a transparent ploy, but it was designed to draw attention to the injustices that hang like kudzu from every aspect of the Olis saga.

O'Quinn is taking the case for free because he believes it could be landmark.

"This," he said, "is the one."

Olis has spent more than three years in prison for his role in Project Alpha, a scheme to boost Dynegy's cash flow by disguising loans as revenue. While he worked on the project, he wasn't the architect. His boss, who told him to do it, testified against him and served a mere 15 months.

Olis chose to fight and lost. His original sentence was 24 years, equal to that of Enron's Jeff Skilling. An appeals court upheld Olis' conviction but not the sentence, and last year, federal Judge Sim Lake lopped 18 years off it.

But it didn't end there. Earlier this year, Olis' trial attorney, Terry Yates, sued Dynegy for unpaid legal fees and won a judgment for $500,000 in back pay plus $2 million in damages. Never mind that his client received one of the stiffest sentences ever issued in a white-collar crime case.

As I said, the injustices are stacked deep.

His legal fees

The Yates trial revealed that the Justice Department pressured Dynegy to stop paying Olis' legal fees. That, the evidence showed, was the price necessary for Dynegy to prove it was cooperating with the Alpha investigation. If it didn't cooperate, Dynegy itself might face indictment and almost certain bankruptcy.

O'Quinn argues that in extracting that cooperation, the prosecutors gave Dynegy's executives, the true Alpha architects, a free pass.

"They bought their way out" by sacrificing Olis, he said.

It amounted to a governmental shakedown.

Prosecutors were all too willing to settle for Olis, to hold aloft a small fish as if it were a great white whale.

Dynegy's bylaws required it to pay the legal fees of an officer who faced legal action for following the company's orders. O'Quinn said Dynegy paid only $14,000 of Olis' fees — chump change for lawyers — leaving him with a feeble defense against the government's onslaught.

Maybe more than Fastow

Perhaps the greatest injustice, though, is that at no point have all the other injustices been factored into Olis' punishment. He's served more than three years already and may wind up serving more than Enron's Andrew Fastow.

Last year, in revisiting the sentence, Lake used a formula to get to the more reasonable sentence of six years, but that still fell short of fairness.

By then, Olis had spent years facing the prospect of losing a quarter of his life to prison, of not seeing his daughter grow up, of regaining his freedom at the age of retirement.

"He deserves his life back," his wife said Tuesday. "His daughter deserves her father back."

A fair decision would have been to take into account the injustice of the case, recognize Olis' time served and set him free.

That, of course, didn't happen, and it's not clear how O'Quinn's theatrics will change anything.

Other lawyers seem to be scratching their heads. Olis, set to be released in August 2009, may be out before O'Quinn's request for a new trial is granted. The 106-page legal brief he filed late Friday repeats a lot of what's already been said.

Maybe that's the point. The Olis case is one injustice piled upon another, a mountain of wrongs the system seems unable to right.